Groat

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  Groat app icon

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  The home screen: this month's total, and one button to hold while you say an expense.

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Inspiration

A groat is an old fourpenny coin. The app is named after the smallest amount worth writing down, because that is exactly the expense that never gets written down.

People who work for themselves do not skip bookkeeping because they are lazy. They skip it because the receipt is in the cupholder, the phone is on a cradle, and opening a spreadsheet at a petrol station is not a thing anyone does. Spreadsheets and desktop software assume a desk, and the people who most need a tool for this do not have one.

What it does

Hold the button and say it out loud: "forty bucks gas, client visit". Let go and it becomes a row with an amount, a category, a note and a date, in a book you can export.

That is the whole interaction. No forms, no dropdowns, no receipt scanning ceremony. If a line comes out wrong, tap the row and fix it. If you would rather type, you can, but the point is the version you can do with one hand at a pump.

The free tier logs 20 entries a month and exports one CSV a month. Pro removes both limits, adds receipt photos, and breaks the month down by category and by job.

How we built it

Expo and React Native on SDK 56, with the book kept in a SQLite database on the phone.

Speech goes through a speech recognition library for Expo and is turned into text on the phone. On the free tier the line is parsed on the phone too, into an amount, a category and a note. On Pro, the text of the line (never the audio) goes to our own server, which also fills in the vendor, job and date. RevenueCat carries the upgrade, and the export writes a CSV.

Challenges we ran into

Spoken money is ambiguous in ways typed money is not. "Eighteen fifty" is 18.50 and "one twenty" is 120, and a wrong number in a ledger is worse than no number, because it looks correct. So the Pro parser only fills in an amount when one was actually said, and otherwise leaves it as a question mark for you to fix. The free parser marks every row it fills in as "Needs check". Tap a row you spoke and it shows exactly what you said.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

It works with one hand while standing outside a van: hold, speak, let go. That constraint threw out several designs that read better on paper.

What we learned

Because the app has one job, every extra tap showed. The talk button had to be the main thing on the home screen, and everything else had to stay out of its way.

What is next for Groat

Mileage from the same voice line, and a quarterly summary that matches what an accountant asks for.

Built With

• android
• expo-speech-recognition
• expo.io
• react-native
• revenuecat
• typescript
• zustand